Flight (19 page)

He shook his head, tight-lipped. ‘I can't come any closer,' he said. ‘I'm phobic about heights.'

This was so surprising that Martagon warmed to him again. But Marina wasn't happy either. She turned away from the panorama that so elated Martagon. ‘It spells money. It spells power. It spells Germany. You have to remember where I'm coming from. I am French, I am Greek, my Greek grandfather was killed by the Germans in Crete.'

‘Do you think the German people didn't suffer too? Think of the bombing of Dresden. Think of what happened to Berlin itself, for that matter.'

‘The Germans brought it upon themselves.'

‘There's always been the other Germany, the Germany of music and philosophy and liberal thought. The war and its horrors are all in the past, darling. Germany's done penance. We have to move along.'

‘Move along to where? I am thinking, I have sold the house and the land that my ancestors cared for, and which was left in my care, for money, and for other people to make even more money. I shouldn't have done it.'

This was not the happy Marina of their life alone together, nor the socialite Marina of the evening before. This was yet another, self-doubting, insecure Marina.

While they went round the theatre her proposition had always been in his mind. The dream come true. It would have to be his dream just as much as hers. No one can inhabit someone else's dream without resentment. How would he survive as a person, without making his work the central task? He imagined the perfect house that they would make, and then saw it filled with chattering French people who were not his real friends, and international expats including bloody Nancy Mulhouse – who was growing monstrous in his imagination – and himself, drinking too much, and growing fat, and struggling with the language, with depression growing in him daily like a cancer. The seriously rich cut themselves off from the lives of ordinary people, they are made characterless by leisure, they are magnificent lepers, unable to be really at ease except with one another.

But rich people can also do good, and use the wealth to make the world a better place. He knew examples of that too. Surely he could settle, find repose, make a home, have a family, become a good person. Their thoughts of last night had been the right ones.

‘My reasons for selling really were unworthy,' she said, when they reached ground level. ‘Basically, it was just my desire to spite Jean-Louis and my fear of death.' Two yards away a pneumatic drill was massacring an inoffensive stretch of pavement.

‘Fear of
death?
What on earth are you talking about?' he shouted.

‘Fear of
debt
!' she yelled back, and they laughed, and the bad moment passed.

She waited while Martagon went into the Harper Cox Portakabin to have a brief discussion about claddings, and to countersign contractors' bills. There was a last-minute problem about the mastic in which an interior glass wall was seated. It wasn't gelling properly. Martagon wrote out a variation order for a new specification, knowing it would add something to the costs. He ran through the schedule again and sorted out the sequence of remaining operations – the critical path – and had a word with the overall site engineer, a calm German. All the time he kept an eye on Marina through the window of the cabin: she was sitting on a bollard, her shoulders hunched. He suspected she was still disturbed. Or perhaps she was just cold. She had the most expressive body. He could read her body as he could not read her mind. Martagon was so attuned to her that he felt her unease as his own.

When he had finished, they walked a while. He showed her the vast curved façade of the Sony building, and the new British Embassy, and the Daimler-Chrysler Building with its glass core shielded by louvred terracotta. She was interested but she was not a walker, and she soon flagged. So then they went and sat together for a long time in the Café Einstein on Unter den Linden and got a bit pissed on champagne, and she was her radiant self again.

She held up a full glass against the light and gazed into it, close up.

‘What the hell?' she said. ‘Do you like that expression? I learned it from Lin. What the hell? All I know is that here is a whole world of liquid gold with lots of clear little bubbles rising from the bottom to the top, on and on. Where are they all coming from? There's nothing and nowhere for them to
be
coming from. And why do they all fly up, on and on, and not round and round like a snowstorm?'

‘For someone from a wine-making family, you are ill-informed.'

‘So tell me.'

‘You don't really want to know, my love.'

*   *   *

Martagon was expected back in London. He had a dinner invitation from Giles and Amanda, which he had accepted, and an appointment with a bread-and-butter private client in the country, in Dorset, for whom he had designed a glass-covered swimming-pool in co-operation with a local architect who was refurbishing the property.

He was not, however, ready to leave Marina. There was too much unresolved. He e-mailed Giles apologetically, jettisoning the dinner date, and sent another e-mail to the Dorset client saying he had unexpectedly been summoned to a project in Prague and would contact him the moment he was back in England. The Prague story was a complete lie, but by the time he clicked on ‘Send' he almost believed it. He said to Marina, ‘I have three or four more clear days. Home now? Or shall we go somewhere else?'

‘We'll do it your way this time', she said, stroking him. ‘We'll go “somewhere else”.'

‘Without a destination?'

‘Yes.' Still stroking.

‘Marina, I love you so much.'

‘Yes.'

*   *   *

Two days later, on a clear day in the Dolomites, they saw a golden eagle soaring against the dramatic craggy peaks, and stopped the car to wonder at it.

‘They can live for a hundred years,' said Martagon,

‘I don't think so.'

‘That's what my mother told me. She loved these mountains. Maybe she was wrong about the eagle. But looking at that great creature, I could believe anything anyone told me about it.'

And then, after a pause: ‘It's exactly six months ago that my mother died.'

He thought, for the eagle the idea of ‘six months ago' has no meaning, even if it is hundred years old. Every minute of the hundred years has equal value and actuality. It lives in the eternal moment. It doesn't know past and future. Some people see the past as the only determining reality – the Jews and the Irish because of their history; and psychoanalysts and their clients. The present for them is a shadow of the past.

I bet Giles never thinks about the past. He lives in the present, and projects his plans and dreams into the future. Lin, too. I think Lin's a bit of a fantasist, and his greatest fantasy is himself.

Marina, for me, makes sense of past, present and future all at once. Maybe that's why, when we are closest, we seem to be in the eternal moment. Like the golden eagle.

‘You are my golden eagle,' he said to her.

‘Your mother,' she said, ‘are you missing her?'

‘I'm not sure. It's as if I'm only just getting to know her, I think I have only begun to understand her since she died.'

He tried to explain to her how in his mother's lifetime he had never related to her in an adult way. He had remained a resentful boy, withholding himself from her loving clutch, struggling for independence – because, before Marina, he had never had another focus for his emotions. ‘So if I appreciate her more now, it's because of you. Everything is because of you.'

*   *   *

The next day the weather changed. They found themselves at midday in low cloud and driving rain, the Alfa sprayed with water and mud from the wheels of juggernaut trucks. Visibility was appalling. Martagon was driving.

‘What does
Notweg
mean in German?' asked Marina. ‘I keep seeing these turns off to the right every so often saying
Notweg.
Why so many turns to the same place?'

‘It's not a place. A
Notweg
is an emergency escape route. If our brakes failed, say, on one of these steep mountain roads, I could veer off into a
Notweg
and avoid disaster. It's a very sensible safety measure. A
Notweg
could save your life, and other people's lives … Do you know what we are coming to now?'

‘We could be anywhere, in this filthy weather. But we must be going over the Brenner Pass. I saw the signs.'

‘Yes. The Brenner Pass. It always seems to me extraordinary. The junction of Europe. Italy and Switzerland behind us now. Austria and Germany ahead, with Austria stretching away into all of Eastern Europe. And to the north and west, France, Belgium and the Netherlands.'

‘And Britain?'

‘Oh, Britain – Britain is, well, Britain is that disconnected space-station somewhere far away to the north-west.'

As he talked to Marina and the juggernauts thundered past, crisscrossing Europe from corner to corner, Martagon for the first time saw Britain, and especially England, for what he thought it was.

England, so self-important. Yet England has absolutely nothing at all to do with this landmass of interlinked peoples and cultures, with its informal frontiers, its languages smudged and merging along national borders. Why should they bother about England, or even think about England, unless in connection with rock groups, or royal scandals, or Manchester United, or BSE, or – for the very old and those interested in history – the two world wars? The only useful bit of the off-shore space-station is the City of London, into which the world beams its money-shuffling transactions.

‘But everyone in Europe has to speak English,' Marina objected. ‘English is the language of commerce, science, the Internet.'

‘That's because of the US, not because of us. Why should Europe give a toss whether Britain belongs properly to the EU, whether we join the monetary union or not? All our blustering and posturing in Brussels looks just pathetic, from here. The Europeans must witness it with bored amusement. We think we are important, we think we matter to this continent. Well, we don't. If it matters to the Brits to join the euro, if that's the consensus, then fine, but we should be modest and businesslike about it and present ourselves acceptably. We used to be respected for justice and what was called fair play. Morally, now, England just spells football hooligans.'

‘It's not pretty to talk about your own country like this. I could never speak about France with so little respect. Though if it means you will live in France, then of course I'm glad you feel this way.'

‘Well, what do
you
think? About England, I mean.'

‘What I think is that geo-politics is not your field, Marteau. There must be more to it all than what you say. When I go to dinner-parties in Paris and sit next to ministers or people of the
corps diplomatique,
they never talk about England like you do.'

‘How do they talk about England?'

‘They are interested, intrigued – maybe they think they do not quite understand.'

‘And what about you? You still haven't said.'

‘The two dearest and most honourable men I have ever known have been Englishmen.'

‘Two?'

‘One is you, of course, I'll tell you about the other sometime. It was a long time ago, when I was young and living in London. I don't want to live in London, but I like going to London, like that millennium time. All French people love going to London. Everything is there, on what you call your off-shore space-station. And English people are tolerant, much more than French people. Lin told me that if he were a black American, he would much rather live in London than in Paris or anywhere in the US. In London, no one disapproves of you if you are different or deviant. Or if they do, they don't show it.'

Martagon suppressed an impulse to cross-question her about the other Englishman. It was never any good pressing Marina to tell him something when she didn't want to. He'd find out another time. He suppressed, too, his irritation at her constant references to Lin. When did Marina have these conversations with Lin?
Chez
Nancy Mulhouse presumably. Forget it. He thought about English tolerance.

‘Tolerance isn't the right word. Tolerance implies that there is something which must be tolerated, and a prejudice which has been consciously overcome. It's not quite that, in England. It's more that nobody really cares what other people are like, or what they do. English people don't give a damn, unless there's some threat. English tolerance is more like indifference.'

‘The effect is the same. An acceptance. It's even better, because there are no noble overtones. No self-congratulation. Another thing, Marteau – I think perhaps you really do not know your own country very well.'

‘That's true. Perhaps I should do something about it.'

‘You were in Asia when you were a little boy, and when you did go to England you were shut up in a boarding-school. Now you are grown-up, you are always somewhere else.'

‘Not any more. I am going to be with you.'

‘Well, that's somewhere else too. Not England, again. We will have to plan for this, Marteau. You will have to prepare – sell your little house, I don't know what else…'

‘I can do all that.'

‘Are you sure?

‘I am sure.'

‘Sure like a contract?'

‘Sure like a contract. We have a contract between us.'

‘No running off into a
Notweg?
'

‘I'll take it step by step,' said Martagon, ‘and stick to the critical path. I'm not going to screw up my chances of life with you. No, darling, no
Notweg
at all.'

*   *   *

His first day back in London, he checked his messages on his home phone and found one from Lin Perry's office asking him to call.